Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.61.0508161413400.29519@gannet.stats>
Date: 2005-08-16T13:15:00Z
From: Brian Ripley
Subject: How to merge two strings
In-Reply-To: <4301D4FC.4030006@lancaster.ac.uk>
On Tue, 16 Aug 2005, Barry Rowlingson wrote:
> Claus Hindsgaul wrote:
>> Thank you all!
>> Paste() was just the function I needed to know!
>
> Or sprintf:
>
> > s1 <- "R-"
> > s2 <- "project"
> > sprintf("%s%s",s1,s2)
> [1] "R-project"
>
> It seems to be much faster:
>
> > unix.time(for(i in 1:100000){junk=sprintf("%s%s",s1,s2)})
> [1] 1.12 0.00 1.12 0.00 0.00
> > unix.time(for(i in 1:100000){junk=paste(s1,s2,sep='')})
> [1] 5.90 0.01 5.92 0.00 0.00
>
> Not that I imagine string concatenation will ever be a bottleneck
> worth optimising but there it is. A well-constructed sprintf() call may
> be more readable than a pastey mess though, with all its fiddly commas
> and quotes - contrived example:
>
> > sprintf("%s://%s%s/%s",scheme,host,dir,file)
> [1] "http://www.foo.com/foo/bar/baz.txt"
>
> > paste(scheme,'://',host,dir,'/',file,sep='')
> [1] "http://www.foo.com/foo/bar/baz.txt"
>
> which do you prefer?
That's actually the reason we have the enhanced sprintf that we do
nowadays: to enable readable (and translatable) error messages to be
written via gettextf.
--
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595